Welcome to our comeback! Where did we go?!?!
Last week, in a whirlwind of optimism we announced an intended return of Tosocnet. It felt like the right time and the right approach. However, dark clouds were rumbling to give the site quite a bit of challenge. I admittedly missed the warning signs.
About 3 weeks after our move, my main workstation’s power supply took a dive. The workstation was old and out of all warranties for service. Some $300 later, the power supply was replaced and I had a working computer again in my office. I of course assumed my server next to it (which was older) was just fine.
I’m guessing that both machines got a bit roughed up in the 5-day drive across the country. On Thursday evening my server ate itself as well. This, sadly wasn’t the power supply (as far as I can tell.) This was a full blown out logic board immolation. (Well, okay. no fire or smoke)
In the non-online world, I actually run a web serving service. Currently, the service is quite no-frills. The income I get as a result reflects this level of service. But I do pride myself on minimal downtime for my customers. Granted my IT staff consists of myself and anyone else I think I am while I’m fixing problems.
To be honest, I’m not an IT person at heart. It’s more of a fantasy-pipe dream. I’m a software developer, which in most companies is an IT person’s worst nightmare. But to be fair, IT people are also developers’ worst nightmare. I came to the realization that the two jobs can be described thusly:
A developer’s job is to take the impossible that has never been done…. and tell you that they can do it and how soon it will be done
An IT administrator’s job is to take the common place and simple and tell you why you can’t do it, and how they will go out of their way to make it impossible for you to even try to do it.
But to let both professions off the hook; getting to an experienced stage in those fields requires a great sense of detente, debate, and ability to work to a middle ground. As always, I digress.
Having web services as something I offer to customers, I can of course give myself web services for projects, this blog for example.
Thursday the server ate itself. Today the server and the blog are back up. This post was started about 5 minutes after I got the PHP backup loaded and the blog serving again.
But, I am experienced and diligent. All my customers’ data was in a remote volume and backed up. All I needed was a machine to put the server back onto. This however was a bit of a financial pinch, as I wasn’t budgeted to buy new hardware for about 6 months.
Nevertheless, my customers have services I have promised and I have readers I intend to continue to talk at.
The new post “Who are you? Who-who? Who-who?” is underway but delayed 2 days due to mad scramble to reconfigure the server. (Which for the record is now at 70%. We’re serving our customers’ data but reassembling their access to the server. This is actually a good thing as it was a project I was going to redo this month.)
Such is my ramble and explanation. More soon.
